Hi and welcome to my first ever blog post, as my rather clumsy but I hope affably charming moniker hints at this is a blog drawn from my experiences as a marketer of over fifteen years' experience and my nine years specialising in the arts and entertainment field.
I find marketing in the arts and entertainment fields to be a peculiar experience, on one hand you have high falutin' government subsidised capital C cultural organisations and institutions and on the flip side you have an array of small to massive commercial operators out to turn a quick buck.
In future blogs I'll detail the extremes to which each side of the industry operate, but firstly I thought I'd make a plea for greater ethics from the commercial side of the game. In my role I am often a gatekeeper between the audience and the marketing efforts of commercial producers and although some belong to the industry body Live Performance Australia, many don't. It actually matters not in this particular case as whilst the LPA has a code of conduct for ticketing, they don't have one for marketing and advertising probably figuring that the laws of land do an adequate job. Well I got news for you they don't!
Time and time again I've seen commercial producer blatantly lie in their advertising, misrepresent product and seek to vary the terms and conditions of an offer after advertised. Here's a rogues gallery of unethical conduct that I've experienced for real:
“The award winning show direct from the Edinburgh fringe” – I checked not only did it not win an award, it was never even staged as part of the Festival!
“Direct from New York” – not it wasn’t it was filled with local dancers and musicians.
“We want to raise tickets for door sales but not tell anybody in the advertising” seriously they tried, I said no.
“These are the published terms and conditions of the offer but here’s what I want your Box office staff to do” Ummm no, our Box Office staff will adhere to the advertised terms and conditions that you just advertised otherwise why did you advertise them???
All this would be funny if it wasn't so well illegal! And amazingly many producers get away with it, why? well I suppose it's the arts so people are used to seeing the lily gilded with heavily chopped quotes and dubious awards, but does it make the untruthfulness any less wrong? I think not.
But what can we do? Firstly I think that the LPA needs a code of conduct for marketing and advertising in addition to it's code for ticketing. which is great for keeping LPA members in line, but what about commercial producers who aren't members? We can't stop people from hiring venues and putting on shows no matter how dodgy they are.
Many years ago I worked in and around the recruitment industry and they had a similar problem, their answer was to encourage members organisations to publish their membership of the industry body on all ads to clearly separate the legitimate practitioners from the dodgy ones and then promote this logo as a sign of quality. Once the LPA get their head around a code of conduct for marketing they need to do the same develop a logo as a badge of credibility in an industry that still has a lot of cowboys to weed out.
Anyway that's about it for my first post, hopefully I've sparked some debate.
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